Parham explains that her daughter, previously content to visit the Golden Arches once a month, became obsessed with going every week in order to collect the full set of Shrek toys offered in Happy Meals.

The lawsuit basically claims that McDonald’s, by “getting into her kids’ heads without my permission,” forced her to spend money there, creating “injury in fact.” The more compelling part of the suit alleges that use of toys to market Happy Meals is illegal because it uses marketing tricks on children who do not have the “cognitive skills and the developmental maturity to understand the persuasive intent of marketing and advertising. Thus, McDonald’s advertising featuring toys to bait children violates California law because it is inherently deceptive and unfair,” the suit reads.

Given that other world-class marketers like Coca-Cola view marketing as so inherently deceptive that they claim that any reasonable adult would not expect a product named vitaminwater to be healthful, it’s hard not to agree that it shouldn’t be deployed against children who can’t be expected to understand that, in an advertisement, up means down and healthy means junk.

The suit was deliberately filed in San Francisco, rather than in Sacramento where Parham lives, because the city has banned toys in meals containing more than 600 calories.

Its chances of success seem, err, slim — of course, so did the McLibel lawsuit‘s in its early stages — but you’ve got to give Parham credit for tapping into the family values meme. Apparently, she’s no stranger to marketing tactics.

But in other San Francisco anti-fast food news, a local team has advanced to the finals in a national competition to reinvent fast food. Rather than burgers, the team of David Gumbiner, Deb Meisel and Ian Sherman propose pad thai.